This invention relates to packaging of primary articles such as so-called brick packages or interconnected cups or pots in multiple packaged cartons and is more particularly concerned with feeding articles from an in-feed stream and for initiating and then completing a loading operation of articles in a multiple tier carton.
A majority of known packaging machines are dedicated machines, which construct only one type of carton. Therefore, modern bottling plants are required to use a plurality of packaging machines to package different carton types, each machine taking up considerable floor space and being expensive to both purchase and operate.
A limited number of packaging machines are capable of packaging different sizes of one carton, for example, six, eight or twelve bottles of a wraparound carton. All such machines require adjustment when switching from one size or type of carton to another. This adjustment includes the manual removal of all of the cartons within the packaging machine and possibly the mechanical adjustment of components in the machine. During this changeover period, which can be thirty minutes or more, a machine cannot be used (known as “downtime”), which is an expensive delay in a bottling plant. Such a delay may even result in downtime for the entire bottling line, not just the packaging machine, if problems arise during the changeover procedure.
It is envisaged that the present invention can be used in various types of packaging machine. Alternatively, the aligning apparatus of the present invention can be sold as an individual module to be fitted to new equipment or to existing equipment on a retro fit basis.
More particularly, this invention relates to a mechanism for aligning a plurality of rows of articles from an in-feed stream at an in-feed end of a packaging machine and is particularly useful for grouping together a plurality of bottles or connected pots in a multiple packaging machine.
In a known mechanism, each tier of articles is selected and aligned at the same time by means of a star wheel feeder. The star wheel feeder comprises two opposed star wheel mechanisms; each mechanism having a star wheel corresponding to a tier. Thus for a three tier pack, each mechanism has three star wheels mounted on a common shaft and adapted to the rotated in unison. Each tier of articles is fed to the star wheel and a backpressure applied to the articles to ensure a continuous flow. Each star wheel selects a particular article in the same relative position for each array and moves each array forward so that each tier is aligned. Thus, the star wheel assembly selects and aligns in one operation.
One problem with this approach is that the speed of the star wheel assembly increases so does the likelihood that the article selection part of the process is not carried out properly and the wrong article from the array is selected, which results in the misalignment of the tiers. One consequence of this problem is that a packaging machine throughput is dictated by the speed of the star wheel assembly, which is undesirable.